nRF52840 DONGLE as nRF Sniffer

[Den]

Hi,

I am very happy that we will be able to use the nRF52840 DONGLE as a sniffer with the new update. I thank to Nordic team. This was something I was waiting for. 

However, I am having a problem while configuring the device. I try to load both softdevice (s140 7.2.0) and the sniffer (3.1.0) hex files using nRF Connect v3.6.1 and it gives me an error;

"Some of the HEX files have overlapping data."

Is this a bug regarding the starting address of sniffer hex or am I missing something?

Thanks,

Den

[Den]

Hi Vidar,

I spent some time trying to solve it but I had no success. It seems that pyserial has been installed but I could not find what's wrong. Do you have any ideas?

Thanks,

Den

[Vidar Berg]

Hi Den,

Hm, looks like the pyserial package is installed correctly. Are you sure you don't have more than one python installation on your system. Maybe you could you try to run 'where python' to see if it returns the path to several python executables or not?

When I run the batch script:

[Den]

Hello Vidar,

I have tried "pip install --user pyserial"  command and it said that Requirement already satisfied. 

Do I have to include something in the path? Python37 and Python37/scripts are already in my user variables. Do I need to include something regarding pyserial specifically?

Den

[Den]

Hello again,

I do not think the problem is about pyserial. It seems to be working fine. I have the sniffer dongle on port 21 and the serial module finds it.

 

what else could it be? 

[Vidar Berg]

Hello Den,

This is strange, I'm not really sure what the issue is. Can you try to set "echo" to on in nrf_sniffer_ble.bat to see how the script is invoked?

@echo on
rem Path to this batch file
set NRF_SNIFFER_BLE_PATH=%~dp0
rem Remove the "\" from the end of the path
set NRF_SNIFFER_BLE_PATH=%NRF_SNIFFER_BLE_PATH:~0,-1%
rem Activate virtualenv if present
if exist "%NRF_SNIFFER_BLE_PATH%\env\Scripts\activate.bat" call "%NRF_SNIFFER_BLE_PATH%\env\Scripts\activate.bat"
rem Find out if the launcher is installed and available
where py > NUL 2>&1 
if %ERRORLEVEL% EQU 0 (
    py -3 "%NRF_SNIFFER_BLE_PATH%\nrf_sniffer_ble.py" %*
) else (
    python "%NRF_SNIFFER_BLE_PATH%\nrf_sniffer_ble.py" %*
)

[Den]

Hi again,

This is what I get with echo ON

[Vidar Berg]

Hi,

Please try to run "python "C:\Program Files\Wireshark\extcap\nrf_sniffer_ble.py" --extcap-interfaces" directly. I can't tell if this command is being issued by the batch script or not.

[Den]

Thanks for your patient support Vidar. Please find it below. 

[Vidar Berg]

Thank you. So it does work when you invoke it directly. do you have a python virtual environment set up in this directory (i.e. do you have a older named "env")? In that case, please try to delete it.

[Den]

I could not find any folders called "env". However, this is a shared computer in the office and Spyder-Anaconda is used on this machine as Python IDE.  Could this be problem? 

[Vidar Berg]

That could be the reason. Are you able to modify the batch script so that it doesn't use the py launcher, but always call python "%NRF_SNIFFER_BLE_PATH%\nrf_sniffer_ble.py" instead?

[Daniel Veilleux]

Py launcher does seem to be a problem:

"""

(env) C:\Program Files\Wireshark\extcap>py -3
Python 3.6.0 (v3.6.0:41df79263a11, Dec 23 2016, 08:06:12) [MSC v.1900 64 bit (AMD64)] on win32
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import serial
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'serial'
>>> exit()

(env) C:\Program Files\Wireshark\extcap>python
Python 3.6.0 (v3.6.0:41df79263a11, Dec 23 2016, 08:06:12) [MSC v.1900 64 bit (AMD64)] on win32
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import serial
>>> exit()

"""